Stories and comments from the author's musical and political life: by John F Goodman

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Tag Archives: Gail Collins

Sometimes the only way to accurately describe a thing is to make a metaphor. In the case of Trumpland, a good metaphor offers more insight into the madness than any blasé description ever could.

Here are some of the better recent ones I’ve found.

A senior House Republican aide responded to Trump’s directive to ban transgenders from the military: “This is like someone told the White House to light a candle on the table and the WH set the whole table on fire.”

Gail Collins of the New York Times is a great metaphorical resource. When Trump tweeted that his AG Jeff Sessions was “beleaguered,” she said: “Now ‘beleaguered’ means under attack, and this was sort of like taking a jackhammer to the street in front of your house and then complaining to the city about potholes.”

Regarding Trump’s off-the-wall speech to the Boy Scouts, she noted: “This was at that Boy Scouts jamboree when Trump did such a great job of impersonating your Uncle Fred Who Gets Drunk at Family Dinners.”

Politico’s Jack Shafer pillories the president’s TV viewing habits: “Like so many of his fellow senior citizens, Trump now spends his golden years huddled at the Fox hearth, shouting amen as it voices his resentments and disappointments. Only the hearth is in the White House.”

He had this to say about Sean Spicer’s recent departure: “Spicer had become the Lord Haw-Haw of the Trump administration. That’s a mighty harsh appraisal. Lord Haw-Haw was, after all, a British citizen who broadcast German propaganda into the UK from Hamburg during World War II. Lord Haw-Haw’s willingness to say everything and anything that would serve his masters finds its parallel, albeit cleansed of the unspeakable Nazi taint, in Spicer’s peacetime opportunism. Nobody took Lord Haw-Haw seriously.”

Spicer, of course, brought out the best in metaphorics. James Wolcott in Vanity Fair: “There must be nights when Sean Spicer springs awake covered with fear sweat like Frank Sinatra in The Manchurian Candidate, wondering how this all happened.”

Bill Maher, known for his always tasteful slams against the president, offered this one: “Once again @realDonaldTrump has taught the nation a valuable lesson: you are never too rich to be white trash.”

And: “If you’re going to go after a woman’s appearance, first make sure you’re not a fat old man with orange face paint, pretending to be a blonde at the age of 71,” Maher said, adding that Trump “glues dryer lint to his head.”

Eliot Cohen evoked a literary comparison: “And at the end of the day, Trump, like Captain Ahab, will probably remain topside, pursuing whatever Moby Dick his imagination has just conjured up. That story did not end particularly well for all aboard.”